“From the pandemic of AIDS, to challenges posed by climate change, to substance abuse and global poverty, our world is faced with increasing complex and pressing social and environmental challenges. While knowledge, tools, and technologies to develop innovative solutions exist, channels are still needed to reach the people who could use and apply them to social problems.”

Stanford podcasts: lend us your ear

The podcast announcement came in the latest installment of the Stanford Knowledge Base an e-newsletter in which I invariably find a few interesting nuggets.

For instance, along with the podcast announcement the July issue contains an article that distills the findings of some Stanford business school researchers who did a study suggesting that the location of a polling place can influence individual voters — and could in fact sway a close election.</P

“Voting at a school could increase support for school spending or voting at a church could decrease support for stem cell initiatives,” said S. Christian Wheeler, associate professor of marketing. Said doctoral candidate Jonah Berger: “In forming election policy, we . . . want to make sure that arbitrary factors such as polling location don’t ultimately influence voting behaviors.”